A few months back I was visiting my Old Drunk Irish Partner who now works with the EU Commission in Brussels. Naturally we met for lunch at an Irish pub in this very French area of the country. The restaurant served some of the most ghoulish dishes one associates with Irish cuisine: meat pie, meat with fries, Guinness soaked meat, meat stew and some kind of a meat drink to wash it all down. Wait, that was more Guinness, not meat.
I used to introduce my ODIP with the phrase, “This is my ODIP, there is really no excuse for him." And, or course there’s not, other than he’s a delightful and bright guy with little to no social skills. Some days you’d say he looks like Drew Carey, other days you’d insist he’s a dead ringer for Shrek. He was dieting that day so he decided to skip the salad to avoid the extra calories and to give him more room for a hunk of meat piled high on fries, which, in Belgium, come with mayonnaise. I had a sense of pride when he fought off requests for dessert.
For all the lousy things I say about my ODIP, the larger truth is he is one of my best friends and one of the biggest reasons I learned to love the Irish and Ireland.
The first day I met him was as interesting a day as one could have. He was asked to work with me by a Danish company and I don’t think he really wanted the help, although he was too interested in meeting this git from the U.S. to say anything about it. He met me at my hotel and said he wanted to show me around town. Indirectly we were working for the Taoiseach (prime minister). At the time, that was Bertie Ahern.
We walked down Merrion Street toward the government buildings when we ran across a short, mostly bald man whose remaining hair was white as snow and flapping about in the wind. My ODIP began to chat it up with the nice fellow. I was introduced, although when sober my ODIP talks like he has marbles in his mouth so I didn’t catch the name of the person we were meeting. When he’s drunk, he’s much easier to understand. After we left the nice man I told my ODIP I didn’t know who we had just met. “Bullocks, that's the Taoiseach, you pelican,” he said.
Because I was more interested in going to Ireland than catching up on local politics, I figured Bertie Ahern was a motherly leader of the island nation. She wasn’t a she but the guy I had just met walking alone down a busy street.
So I said to my ODIP, “Why is the Taoiseach walking around without bodyguards"
“Why on earth would he need one of them?” he asked.
“Never mind,” I said, and began to like Ireland and the Irish even more.
While Bill Clinton was president, one of his first official visits was with the Taoiseach at the time, Charles Haughey. Clinton, wanting to show his determination for peace in other countries and act like he had the international stuff down, decided to lecture Haughey on the runaway violence in his country. Haughey simply told Clinton that Ireland registered only 38 murders the year before and asked the new, brash president, how many murders were committed in Washington, DC the year before. Clinton responded, “Let me introduce you to George Mitchell.” More reason to love the Irish and Ireland.
Later that night, my ODIP met me at the beautiful and historic Merrion Hotel where I was staying. It may be old and historic, but it’s not exactly the heart of where all the fun is happening in Dublin. Just the same, he suggested we have a drink in the hotel bar – not the last such offer I’d have that night by a long shot. My ODIP ordered a gin and tonic, and then another and another still while I nursed a pint of Guinness. He looked around and said, “For fuck sake, nobody’s in the bar, let’s go get us to a proper bar.”
I pointed to an old drunk man, face down on his table in the back of the bar and told my ODIP were weren’t exactly alone. My ODIP explained, “Oh, him. He always comes around here on the weekend to pick a fight with the tourists. That’s Van Morrison and he’s a terrible fighter, especially when he’s pissed. I’ll finish your beer and let’s go." More reason to love Ireland and the Irish.
We went to a wine bar where we met up with a colleague. I think he and his friend believed I would find a wine bar more up to my prissy American standards. They ordered three bottles of wine, not exactly meant to be doled out proportionately. I may have had one and a half glasses before the bottles were empty and it was time to head to the local political hangout on the Temple Bar. On the way there I noticed guardrails along the sidewalk. “What are these for?” I asked. My ODIP said, “It’s for the drunks to keep from falling in the streets and into the drunk drivers. Mind the vomit…” Another reason to love Ireland and the Irish.
When we got to the political hangout, I was quickly introduced to 1,000 Irish politicos packed into space for 35 Irish politicos. My back was slapped a lot and I heard, “So you’re from America, you are,” a few thousand times. I also was asked if I wanted another beer equally as often, as it was puzzling to the locals that I was still on my first beer.
I decided to try my hand at some humor to my new 1,000 well-quenched friends. I mentioned I was a direct descendent of Oliver Cromwell. “Oh, no, don’t say that, mate,” one of my occupiers of the same square inch warned. “Not a good idea to say that here, you may get a good talking too,” another said. So I guess an admission that one of my relatives brutally reigned over the Irish on behalf of the British Crown some 350 years earlier was in bad taste. Despite the fact I brought up a name of a man who attempted to cleanse the Irish Island of the Irish, I was just told to think of a better way to open a conversation. By now I’m sure you love the Irish, too.
While I was there the country was consumed with the Gaelic Football championship, more super than our Super Bowl. As a consequence there was no available hotel space in the entire country for that weekend. I decided to take advantage of the lodging shortage and take a train up to Northern Ireland whose inhabitants could care less about Gaelic Football Championships.
The first thing you note heading north is the plush landscape, so tiresomely pretty, so unrelentingly restful to the eyes that it may be the most beautiful place on the planet. It’s so lush and trim, you’d swear it was plotted out in fairways by Robert Trent Jones. I went through areas that my travel book warned me were too dangerous to venture outside the train stations. During the long, winding trip on tracks that were not designed for jotting notes on a pad of paper and pencil less you were designing Rorschah Tests, I read up on how the British came to claim this land.
It turns out that Diaruid MacMurrough, King of Leinster, ran off with the comely wife of Tighernan O’Rourke, Prince of Breffni in 1152. O’Rourke raised such a stink (and an army) that MacMurrough had to call King Henry II of England for help. The Brits arrived, somewhat tardily, in 1169 and proceeded to commit unforgiveable sins on the Irish. For the next 830 years (and still counting) the English stole land, crushed rebellions, exploited the populace, persecuted Catholics, dragged a bunch of Scottish settlers into Ulster, crushed rebellions of the Scottish settlers, held potato famines, hanged patriots, stamped out the language, taxed everybody’s pig and generally behaved in a manner much different than the Irish would have if it had been the Irish who invaded England and the shoe was on the other foot (assuming the Irish could afford shoes).
By the time I arrived at the main train station in Belfast I had read enough that I figured I would be pointed out as a Brit and taken to a nearby bucolic field and beaten with a blunt object, such as my captors' sense of humor. I decided to have a stiff drink to get the right wobble down so the natives would think I was one of them.
I hailed a taxi to take me around town. My dirvier's name was Dickie and I’ll never know if he was Catholic or Protestant or somewhere in between. I just know he was able to safely drive a taxi around the Falls Road ghetto and down Shankhill Road. Dickie first pointed out Cave Hill, which rises above Belfast like Sugar Loaf Mountain above Ipanema Beach. “Some say Belfast is an Hibernian Rio.” Maybe so, but I don’t think I’d want to see an Irish woman walking around in a string bikini. He drove me by tall Flats, high rise housing built in the Sixties when city planners hadn’t yet learned it’s a bad idea to stack poor people who drink.
As in all the world’s poor places, there were plenty of idle young men with tattoos and beer. Dickie informed me the unemployment rate was “125 percent.” But there was still a pleasantness about these slums. Young boys were out playing soccer, all the windows had freshly picked flowers in the neatly attached flower boxes above the perfectly maintained brick buildings. “You Irish have a lot to learn about slums,” I said. “Where’s your incoherent rage? Your homeless living in Hefty bags? In the slums in America you could be mugged a dozen times before lunch on a good day.”
“Well you wouldn’t want to leave your car unlocked around here,” Dickie said defensively. “Not with your suitcase and computer in here, I can tell you."
Dickie took me to the famous Avenue Bar, which had been the scene of numerous partisan attacks, including a Protestant walking in and wildly firing an AK-47 into the crowded bar a few years earlier. “A spray job,” Dickie called it. He told me to go in and he’d wait for me. “It’s a big tourist stop,” he added in a comforting manner. The moment I walked in I was identified as an American. The bar, I found out, had also been bombed in 1976 and 1983 along with the 1988 attack. I was surprised it was still open and barely a seat could be found. I was told the day after the 1988 shooting the bar was jammed.
As soon as I sat down a man moved to my side and said, “You’re American, you are,” and handed me a pint of beer. He was friendly and wanted to talk to me about political economy, international law and theoretical analysis of Irish history since the Battle of the Boyne. I just wanted to know if the food was any good. “It’s shit, it is,” he said, “But the talk is what you come in here for.”
I asked him about the shootings and if he was there or would tell me about it. “No, no, it was too dreadful to speak about. The way the Protestant animals came in the front door just there,” he pointed. “They were looking normal as the day and one pulls out an AK-47 from beneath his long coat and shoots up this corner here where Damien Devlin and Paul McBride died, and then he shoots down the length of the bar this way, killing poor Stephen McGaghan and bullets going right into the women’s loo – if there had been anyone there, they’d have died certain."
I guess he really didn't mind talking about it and the conversation drew a bit of a crowd, all with huge glass mugs of beer. They all nodded their heads in agreement with my new friend. “You were there that day?”
“I’m always here on Friday. I thought I was dead, I did. I said a Hail Mary and jumped over the bar for my life.”
We talked further about the reasons for the years of partisan battle. He referred to the 300-year-old civil war in the country as the “Troubles” and said it was all the fault of unemployment and the “boyos” out shooting and bombing each other. The Troubles. An interesting and pleasant way to call a three-century bloody war.
Do you see why I like Ireland and the Irish?
